Green Screen combines film studies with environmental history and politics, aiming to establish a cultural criticism
informed by 'green' thought. David Ingram argues that Hollywood cinema has largely perpetuated romantic attitudes
to nature and has played an important ideological role in the 'greenwashing' of ecological discourses.
The book accounts for the rise of environmental concerns in Hollywood cinema, and explores the ways in which attitudes
to nature and the environment are constructed in a number of movies. It is divided into three sections: Wilderness
in Hollywood Cinema; Wild Animals in Hollywood Cinema; Development and the Politics of Land Use.
Movies discussed include The China Syndrome, Pocahontas, Free Willy, Chinatown, Gorillas in the Mist, Medicine
Man
Topics include rain forests, wildlife conservation, rural and urban ecologies, quests for energy
Green Screen combines film criticism, cultural criticism, ecocriticism, and a bit of environmental history in
an engaging and useful way. Its selection of films, many of which are described in some detail, will be useful
to those who are entering the field. Its insights will be of value to ecocritical scholars and to those who want
to bring environmental film into their classroom.
'[Ingram's] filmography in Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema contains more than 150 Hollywood
movies from the 1890s to the 1990s "in which an environmental issue is raised explicitly and is central to the
narrative". He manages to analyze almost half of these in a dozen short chapters organized around three central
themes: the wilderness, wild animals, and the politics of land use including the impacts of the automobile and
nuclear power. This book will be valuable to anyone interested in politics and popular culture, American movies,
and environmentalist debates on the meaning of nature.' American Studies International, Vol. 39, No. 3, Oct 2001
Table of Contents
Spaces
1. Constructing Nature: Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon
2. Electrifying the American West: 1880-1940
3. Domestic Landscape: Wright Morris' The Home Place
Narratives
4. Four Narratives of New Deal Electrification
5. Energy Narratives
6. Space of the Past: E.L. Doctorow's World's Fair
Narratives in Space
7. Electrifying Expositions: 1880-1939
8. European Exhibits at the 1939 World's Fair
9. Don't Fly Me to the Moon: The Public and the Apollo Space Program
10. Postmodernism and the Computer
